NYU, part 1 of 3
From CAS math to Stern
Not knowing what to do next, and knocking on doors anyway.
Context
I started at NYU in fall 2023 in the College of Arts and Science, studying Math and Computer Science. I chose NYU for a practical reason: I wanted to live in a city where I could keep working while I studied.
The problem
Once I arrived, I wasn’t sure what to do next. My gap year had told me I wanted to understand whole businesses, not just build pieces of them. It hadn’t told me what job that was.
What I did
Changing schools
Two things changed my direction. The first was noticing how differently the UK and the US see business degrees. The second was meeting people in New York who had built careers and companies. Talking to them, it became obvious that my real interest was business.
Math had given me analytical training, and I liked it. A business degree would give me range and more options. So I went through NYU’s competitive internal transfer and moved to the Stern School of Business, where I now study Finance and Math.
3,000 emails
The most common path at Stern was finance, and I wanted to see it from the inside instead of guessing. I didn’t know anyone in the industry. So I wrote to people who did the work: more than 3,000 cold emails to over 500 firms, including banks, venture capital firms, private equity funds and hedge funds.
Most didn’t reply. Some did. That led to my first formal internship the following summer.
A club with no budget
I also joined the Korean Honors Business Society, and later became its vice president for marketing and alumni relations. When the club was facing a year with more fixed costs than money, I secured venue and food sponsors that removed about $3,000 of event costs. I also rebuilt our outreach and ran alumni events twice a year, with more than 120 people attending.
What I learned
A cold email isn’t a one-time shot. The first message is just the start of a relationship, and most of the value comes from what happens after. My next two finance roles, at Piermont and Morgan Stanley, both came from people I first emailed that year and kept in touch with.
The other lesson was more personal. I had arrived at NYU not knowing what I wanted, and it would have been easy to wait until I did. Knocking on doors turned out to be a better way of finding out.